So far, we’ve tried to avoid ever discussing the “d” word, donations! We’ve felt that as a good project, we wanted to try to avoid having to deal with money, but it’s getting to the point where it seems inevitable. The factors involved revolve around our need for hardware, costs associated with appearing at open source conferences, and most importantly, our lack of devs – we really need a bug bounty program to get some things fixed, or if we have enough, the money to hire outside developers to help us get Nightingale to be all it can be.

Some of the ideas on the table include accepting PayPal, bitcoins, litecoins and whatever other digital currencies, and perhaps setting up an indiegogo page – which of these do you like best? Do you have any other/better ideas? If you happen to have disposable income, and would like to pledge an amount to hire a developer or setup a bug bounty, we’re of course interested in hearing from you as well.

Please, tell us what you think here in the comments, in our IRC channel, #nightingale on mozdev, or on the forums.

With the upcoming Nightingale 1.12 release, we will be introducing the first changes to our API. Don’t worry, as they should not break the majority of our add-ons. These changes are a result of our decision to upgrade to a completely unpatched, vanilla XULRunner 1.9.2.28 — thus removing some additional patches by POTI. The patch with the most impact affects search engines. If you aren’t an add-on developer, you may not want to read on, since this post is mainly an informative post about the changes I made. Continue reading ‘Changes to Search Engines’